SMITE 2 | New God Reveal Trailer | Hecate
After a few months of teasing, SMITE 2 developer Titan Forge has revealed everything players can expect from the sequel's first brand-new god, Hecate, including a look at her abilities and the ways in which Unreal Engine 5 has helped the team bring her to life.
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00:00 I walk between realms. Tartarus calls for you. Open the gates. All magic flows to me.
00:14 Hecate is a Greek goddess of sorcery, magic, witchcraft.
00:24 We're bringing her to SMITE because she's a goddess that people have been asking for for a while and she's pretty iconic.
00:30 For Hecate, we wanted to make sure that we didn't go hard with her as a witch herself.
00:34 She's a goddess of witchcraft. As far as when it relates to animation, one of the key things that we're trying to drive with her is just her etherealness,
00:41 her presentation, floaty, soft, out in the ether, that type of feel.
00:46 We pitched a lot of crazy UE5 tech stuff that we had to check with the engineering team.
00:50 We found a good combination of what we thought was possible.
00:54 The biggest difference was really the prototyping phase.
00:57 Usually what we would do is just send most of that to programming.
01:01 Instead, the designers started with it.
01:03 The designer, her abilities 1, 3, 4 were virtually entirely set up by me with no programming assistance.
01:10 That was very different than what we do in SMITE 1 in that those abilities all had significant changes over time
01:16 because of the ability to prototype, test, and adjust all in the design team.
01:20 Hecate is the first god in SMITE 2 that we are building completely inside the UE5 control rig.
01:26 Basically, it takes the ability for us as animators to work directly in the editor instead of working in software.
01:32 All the character artists have been using Unreal 3 for almost 15 years under their belt.
01:38 Basically, learning the new tools and where they can expand things and leverage.
01:44 Do we do more texture maps now to give better resolution and stuff like that?
01:48 Higher polygon counts, things of that nature.
01:50 The biggest thing has been probably cloth simulation and learning the ins and outs.
01:53 She has simulated cloth physics on her movement.
01:56 In SMITE 1, we had to hand-key animate all cloth to make it look as much like it was flowing in the wind and stuff like that.
02:02 But Hecate actually has a big cloth veil that actually moves and responds to the physics and the world around her.
02:08 There's some clear out-of-the-box gains.
02:11 We get to see cloth simulation live in the fly.
02:14 We can update something in the editor and see it while we're playing in editor, see it update immediately.
02:19 The workflow paths are much quicker and smoother.
02:22 The part that's kind of had us leveling to a middle ground here is we are still learning it.
02:26 So we get some awesome upgrades. We're learning those on the fly.
02:29 It's balancing together. So it's been a challenge, but it's been an awesome challenge.
02:32 She has two, I'd say, really unique gameplay features on the kit.
02:37 One is that she kind of has a twist on the interact feature.
02:41 Hecate has two special case interacts just for her that in certain situations she can now interact.
02:47 So her passive is actually kind of an active in this way.
02:51 The other one is her ability 2.
02:55 She puts down a magic orb. Every single ability that's activated from an enemy god or ally god powers it up.
03:02 And then she re-fires it to do damage based on how much fighting was going on in the area.
03:07 Another one of Hecate's abilities, we're rendering a flow map over everything,
03:11 which is this texture that takes these black and white information and is distorting everything,
03:16 making it look really cool and otherworldly.
03:19 I think the world material visuals, that is just something we wouldn't have done the same way
03:25 or couldn't have done the same way in UE3.
03:28 In UE5 it just looks different and you can actually tell.
03:31 I can look at another character model and see they look normal.
03:34 Then I can look at the world and the ground and the environment and see that is all distorted.
03:39 We have a level of control that we couldn't have done in UE3 visually.
03:42 Doing the first new god and SMITE 2 Hecate has been a fun and interesting challenge.
03:48 We hope that the work we've put in resonates well.
03:51 We're really excited to get it in the hands of the players.
03:54 We had a lot of fun just pushing the limits of what we can do for the characters and abilities
03:59 and everything of Hecate. So we hope you enjoy it.
04:02 Like I said, I know the team here really had a great time, so we hope you do as well.
04:06 Obviously everyone on the dev team were very excited to let more players into SMITE 2.
04:10 The closed testing with ambassadors and streamers and pros has been really fun.
04:15 And with employees has been really fun.
04:18 We hear a lot of positive feedback every test and then also a long, long, long to-do list.
04:24 We're trying to remake over 10 years worth of game here.
04:27 So the to-do list is long, but we're looking for improvements and quality everywhere we can.
04:33 And I think we're finding it in almost every place.
04:35 We're finding something good to change and improve as we go.
04:38 Which all combined together just feels really good.
04:42 [Music]
04:53 you